"So my slightly more realistic hope is that we learn to judge each other based on meaningful qualities. Things like shared values and a common sense of decency and a willingness to stand up against injustice"

Agreed, although I'm writing an article right now about someone's challenge last year on Medium just before I got kicked off. One of Medium's very good, but too-woke-for-her-own-alleged-feminist-good writers (and now a super-woke Medium staff member) and I were debating trans issues, and she fell on the 'transwomen are women' side. She asked where my compassion was & I asked where her brain was. The article is about the thinking I've done about compassion since then, and how easy it is to be compassionate toward people you like, and less about Those Other People (the ones you don't).

The ones I'm less compassionate about are the 'acceptable' Thems on t'other side - the people who belong to fundamentalist religion, MAGAs, white supremacists, etc. It's not okay to discriminate against people who were born with a particular biology, but it's okay to discriminate against those with bad values, hateful creeds, etc.

Why are we less compassionate about *them*? They may not have been born into a particular biology but they were into a certain family, community, culture, etc. and may not know any other way. The ones who think critically may leave that unhealthy mental prison but others may not; I'm reminded of a book written by a woman who escaped a fundamentalist Mormon polygamous compound out West who described in detail why so many women never questioned or challenged the notion that they had to be held essentially in bondage to male whims and sexual desires. A fundamentalist Christian friend I had years ago - someone who wasn't very worldly or bright and with some likely brain chemistry-related emotional regulation problems - told me when she was three her mother told her Jesus loved her and always would and she believed it, and stuck with her birth religion without ever questioning it.

She was a very kind and sweet person which made her fundamentalism easier to overlook than if she'd been a hateful Republican (which, back then, over 35 years ago, they weren't nearly as bad, but Ronald Reagan was setting the scene for the mess we're in today).

I'm working slowly toward trying to engage with Those People in dribs and drabs to try and understand why they think as they do, and whether there are ways to get through their muddy thinking. And who knows, maybe I'll find something to challenge my own muddy thinking at times ;)

Some ask, 'What would Jesus do?' I ask myself, 'Who would Buddha hate?'